China Work­place Deaths Fall to 38,000 in 2017

SHANG­HAI (Dis­patches) - The num­ber of deaths caused by work­place ac­ci­dents in China fell 12.1 per­cent to 38,000 in 2017 com­pared to the pre­vi­ous year, state me­dia re­ported on Tues­day, cit­ing fig­ures from the coun­try’s safety watch­dog.

But fines for work safety vi­o­la­tions rose 58 per­cent in the year to around 3.3 bil­lion yuan ($521.10 mil­lion), the of­fi­cial China Daily re­ported, quot­ing the Min­is­ter of the State Ad­min­is­tra­tion of Work Safety Wang Yupu.

Wang said more than 4.6 mil­lion on­site in­spec­tions were con­ducted last year, but warned China faced growing pres­sures in the work­place with around 43 mil­lion peo­ple trav­el­ing to work ev­ery day and one bil­lion tonnes of haz­ardous chem­i­cal sub­stances trans­ported each year.

Fol­low­ing a se­ries of na­tion­wide cam­paigns against il­le­gal min­ing, the num­ber of deaths in the coal sec­tor has fallen steadily from a peak of nearly 5,000 in 2003.

A re­cent cam­paign against over­ca­pac­ity in the sec­tor has also helped boost safety, with a to­tal of 6,100 small-scale mines shut down over the course of 2017.

Huang Yuzhi, head of China’s State Ad­min­is­tra­tion of Coal Mine Safety, warned that around 28 per­cent of China’s to­tal coal mines still had an­nual pro­duc­tion ca­pac­ity of less than 90,000 tonnes, and were there­fore more ac­ci­dent prone.